"Enigma" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hover about the enigma of the scarlet letter seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest epoch of her conscious life, she had entered upon this as her appointed mission. Hester had often fancied that Providence had a design of justice and retribution, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I turned at his reply, Fixing the silent symbol with my eye, Insistently. "And you consent," I said, "To leave the enigma uninterpreted?" ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... convinced that it was this unfortunate attachment, in which for a moment she had felt herself so supremely blest, that was the source of her misfortunes. But then, how had Nisida discovered the secret? This was an enigma defying conjecture; for Francisco was too honorable to reveal his love to his sister, after having so earnestly enjoined Flora herself ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... on a very strange subject—it is all an enigma!" said Evelyn, shaking her wise little head with a pretty gravity, half mock, half real. "Ah, if Lord Vargrave should love you—and you—oh, you would love him, and then I should be free, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book I • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... swallowed in considerable quantities without deleterious result—all the poison that could be extracted from a half dozen of the largest and most virile reptiles was powerless in any way to affect an unfledged bird when poured into its open beak. Chemistry is not only powerless to solve the enigma of its action, and the microscope to detect its presence, but pathology is at fault to explain the reason of its deadly effect; and all that we know is that when introduced even in most minute quantities into an open wound, the blood is dissolved, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... man while speaking on the tribune, are indescribable. There is in it all so much that is winsome and yet so much delicate irony, that one is enchained as by a marvelous curiosity, a sweet, strange enigma. We know not if these are the refined manners of a French marquis or the straightforward simplicity of an American citizen. All that is best in the ancien regime, the chivalresque courtesy and tact, are here wondrously fused with what is best in the modern ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Until the Major's unrivalled first descent in 1869 the river was equally unknown. Even above Gunnison Crossing, despite the spasmodic efforts at exploration referred to, the river had remained a geographical enigma, and to the Major belongs the sole credit for solving this great problem throughout its length from the Union Pacific crossing in Wyoming to the mouth of the Virgin River—the last problem of this kind within the United States. Hampered as the first party was by loss of provisions and ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... life has chanced to run side by side with my own for a short space, and the two have now branched off, nor in all likelihood will ever meet again. My life has been a quiet one, and has not lain much in the way of extraordinary men, but I doubt if many such as Simon Colliver exist. He is a perfect enigma to me. That such a man, with such attainments (for besides his wonderful conversation and power of singing, he has an amazing knowledge of foreign tongues), that such a man, I say, should be a mere attorney's clerk is little short of marvellous. But as regards his past he told me nothing, ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the King and Queen, but that she had been hidden away on account of her colour; and the report was spread that the Queen had had a miscarriage. Many people believed this story; but whether it was true or not has remained an enigma. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... is the great enigma of Art History,—you must not follow Art without pleasure, nor must you follow it for the sake of pleasure. And the solution of that enigma is simply this fact; that wherever Art has been followed only for the sake of luxury or delight, it has contributed, and largely contributed, to ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... sense." But this transcending of the Old Testament religion was the very thing that was unintelligible, because there were few ripe for such a conception. Moreover, the origin of the Johannine writings is, from the stand-point of a history of literature and dogma, the most marvellous enigma which the early history of Christianity presents: Here we have portrayed a Christ who clothes the indescribable with words, and proclaims as his own self-testimony what his disciples have experienced in him, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... Wilfrid's thinking, he had suffered eclipse—had become a somewhat heavy, apathetic, pseudo-cynical youth, displaying his mother's inertia without her good temper, too slack to keep up his cricket, too slack to work for the honor schools, at no time without friends, but an enigma to most of them, and, apparently, something ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I, bustling in, in a hurry to reach the fire. "How comfortable you look! how cold it is!—Algy!!" For the enigma of the noise is solved. It was Algy who shuffled and scuffled—yes, scuffled up from the low stool which he has evidently been sharing with the pretty shoes—at Mrs. Huntley's feet, on to his long ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... on the edge of a table. But what immediately attracted their attention was a row of those large glass vessels like that which they had seen in the adjoining room. Each was covered with a white cloth. They hesitated a moment, for they knew that here they were face to face with the great enigma. At last Arthur pulled away the cloth from one. None of them spoke. They stared with astonished eyes. For here, too, was a strange mass of flesh, almost as large as a new-born child, but there was in it the beginnings of something ghastly ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... drawn by the aptness of the text to my problem. Had Maupassant given me the key of the whole enigma? Was this astonishing genius, who had so wrought upon our imaginations, was he a criminal irresistibly driven to tell us the story of his evil life? Were the police of Europe and America even now scouring the surface of the globe for him? That brother, that dare-devil gentleman ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... unaccountable feeling, which sometimes forbids a generous sentiment to betray itself to another, he veiled his earnest friendship under a guise of mere clerkly companionship, rarely giving way to those bursts of tender feeling, which rendered him, in Guly's young eyes, an absolute enigma. ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... in the settlement of a large share of the State, is an enigma to those not versed in our early history. While occupying the position of a dependent of the central power at Washington, we were so unfortunate in some instances as to have men placed over us with whom personal interests were paramount to the great ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... an enigma, for he set the men to cutting and trimming tall sapling poles. To these were tied (how reverently!) the twenty stands of colors which loving Creole hands had stitched. The boisterous day was reddening to its close as the Colonel lined his little ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... after having freed it from any "spiritistic" meaning, the term still leaves me reluctant; for I cannot hide from myself the weakness of a hypothesis which, in order to explain (only in part) one enigmatical fact (in this case, that of "thinking animals"), must have recourse to another unsolved enigma (in this case that ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... such as the drama, dancing, dress, have been anathematised by puritans, while philosophers have written elaborate treatises in their defence—the enigma is solved, when we discover that these words suggested a set ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of the jargon and slang of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade the greatest name of their country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic doubts. The fanaticism ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... this self-betrayal, I coloured deeply under Sinclair's eye, and was but little, if any, relieved when I noticed that he coloured under mine. For his feelings were no enigma to me. Naturally, he was glad to discover that I shared his apprehensions, since it gave him leave to hope that the blow he so dreaded was not necessarily directed toward his own affections. Yet, being a generous fellow, he blushed to be detected ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... spectacles. In a great city he would be taken for a savant, though difficult to tell what he may be, seen in the Llano Estacado surrounded by a desert. In the same place, the other and younger man is equally an enigma, for his bearing proclaims him both gentleman and soldier, while the coat on his back shows the undress uniform of an officer of more ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... hideously unhappy as she stretched before him in her white robes of death. Why? What secret was this disclosed at the twelfth hour of life, on the very brink of the grave? Did death, then, hold the solution to the enigma of the conquering Sphinx! ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... salve, in the male, sir. What it can mean is not easily discovered: if mail for a packet or bag was a word then in use, no salve in the mail may mean, no salve in the mountebank's budget. Or shall we read, no enigma, no riddle, no l'envoy—in the vale, sir—O, sir. plantain. The matter is not great, but one would wish for ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... be done. They will then have a voice and a vote in the matter, and the men will no longer be able to throw the country into a war to gratify spite or ambition, tearing from woman's arms her nearest and dearest. All men do not like "military duty." "The key to that horrible enigma, German socialism, is antagonism to the military system," and nations are shaken with fear because of it. But when there is necessity for military duty, women will be found in line. The person who planned ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Cithaeron, beseeching him to look after his two daughters whose birth is so stained that no man can ever wed them. Creon gently takes him within, to be kept there till the will of the gods is known. The end is a sob of pity for the tragic downfall of the famous man who solved the Sphinx' enigma. ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... result in a kind of partial paralysis of the brain; this then shows itself throughout their whole life in a silly bigotry, making even extremely intelligent and capable people among them degrade themselves so that they become quite an enigma to us. If we consider how essential to such a masterpiece is inoculation of belief in the tender age of childhood, the system of missions appears no longer merely as the height of human importunity, arrogance, and impertinence, but also of absurdity; in so far as it does not ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... signature, the contrary of what he has written, thought, or felt. To do this is an offence almost amounting to a moral crime." I write more at length on this topic to my friends of the Place Louis Quinze, and I beg you to speak to none but them of my enigma, which assuredly you have already solved; I hope that what has now offended and vexed me will not happen again. In saying what was necessary, I used very guarded expressions. I do not wish a rupture, the vengeance of which might fall on cherished ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... stockstill near the card-players, but he did not go home earlier than usual. Some time later he received a packet addressed to him; in it was the ring he had given the princess. She had drawn lines in the shape of a cross over the sphinx and sent him word that the solution of the enigma—was the cross. ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... events had rather bewildered her. Her countenance was stamped with a wondering expression as though she were gazing at the upsetting of the most elemental physical laws. In reflective silence she was puzzling over the Marne enigma, unable to understand how it was that the Germans had not conquered the ground on which she was treading; and in order to explain this failure, she resorted ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... if that is so, we must at least ask with more curiosity than he allows for, why it was that man actually found his ultimate good on earth under the stars, and threw it away again. It is this extraordinary enigma to which I propose ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... we should consider human beauty as a kind of enigma, or a thing to dispute about, is not surprising; nor even that we should often differ from ourselves, when so much of the outward man is thus made to depend on the shifting humors of some paramount Petronius of the shears. But, ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... Amsterdam wrote that the free man thinks of nothing less than of death; but this free man is a dead man, free from the impulse of life, for want of love, the slave of his liberty. This thought that I must die and the enigma of what will come after death is the very palpitation of my consciousness. When I contemplate the green serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... The colloquy had occupied some moments, but when Renwick came to a straight reach of road which led toward the tobacco factory buildings he was surprised to find that Herr Linke was nowhere in sight. The man was an enigma, a curious mixture of desperado and buffoon, but his sudden disappearance without a word of thanks, apology or explanation, gave Renwick something to puzzle over as he made his way to the bridge. Its possible significance escaped him until he had reached the ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet," is an axiom with most Englishmen to whom the oriental character seems an insoluble enigma. This form of agnosticism is unworthy of a nation which is responsible for the happiness of 300,000,000 Asiatics. It is not justified by history, which teaches us that civilisation is the result of the mutual action of Europe ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... it. And now this salon that he had simply desired to traverse, at once seemed altogether delightful to him. And all this was due to his meeting a divine creature in the midst of this crowd. He was eager to find Marianne, to see her again. She aroused his curiosity as some enigma might. ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... arising from their habits of improvisation and competitive versifying. They have also the epic or sjair, generally a pure romance, with much naive simplicity and natural feeling. And finally, they have the popular song, enigma, ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... evil-smelling dark bottle in the Italian's inside coat-pocket, which was an enigma. It was not ginger pop or beer, or any kind of soda water; Black Bruin knew all of these drinks himself, and this drink was ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... the postal service, the travellers who had any baggage were forced to keep it between their legs, already tortured by being squeezed into a sort of little box in shape like a bellows. The original color of coach and running-gear was an insoluble enigma. Two leather curtains, very difficult to adjust in spite of their long service, were supposed to protect the occupants from cold and rain. The driver, perched on a plank seat like those of the worst Parisian "coucous," shared in the conversation by reason of his position between his victims, ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... they answer that there is nothing to be done, that no human power could avert or thwart the issue. Are they mad, bored, irritable, or accessory to a hideous pleasantry? Does our fate depend on the happy solution of some petty enigma or childish conundrum, even as our salvation, in most of the so-called revealed religious, is settled by a blind and stupid cast of the die? Is all the liberty that we are granted reduced to the reading of a more or less ingenious riddle? Can the great soul of the ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... to produce a commencement of disorder, might ally itself to more permanent causes of discontent, and thus continue the effect beyond its first cause. The scarcity of bread, which continues very great amidst a plenty of corn, is an enigma which can be solved only by observing, that the furnishing the city is in the new municipality, not yet masters of their trade. 2. A public bankruptcy. Great numbers of the lower as well as higher classes of the citizens, depend for subsistence on their property in the public funds. 3. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... more profitably be devoted to the study of humanity." Again, "That central point in all religious belief—the existence of God—has not yet been approached in a frank spirit. The very terms of the assertion are as yet an enigma in language, the fact is yet a problem in philosophy; the world possesses as yet no adequate logic for that province of our speculation which lies beyond our immediate experience."[262] "Man must die to solve the problem of Deity's existence."[263] "The existence of God is a problem ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... tell it; though I know not, With the respect your presence gives me, With the affection you awaken, With the esteem your worth elicits, How with bold face here to tell you That this outer dress is simply An enigma, since it is not What it seems. And from this hint, then, If I'm not what I appear, And Astolfo with this princess Comes to wed, judge how by him I ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... insoluble enigma is woman! From the specimen of feminine delicacy and modest diffidence which we have just presented to the reader, who would imagine that Kate Hogan was capable of entering into the deep and rooted sorrow which Kathleen ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... girls who were sitting in the shade, (with big white umbrellas over them to keep the freckles off,) were puzzling their heads over charades and enigmas, instead of running around and making little Frou-Frous of themselves. Mr. P. composed an enigma for a group of these young students. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various
... garden-party of some kind at Georgia Timberlake's. Cowperwood looked at her with—for him—a morbid eye. He was all cheer, geniality, pleasant badinage; but he was thinking all the while what a shameless enigma she was, how well she played her part, what a fool she must take him to be. He gave her youth, her passion, her attractiveness, her natural promiscuity of soul due credit; but he could not forgive ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... by the evangelist in a marked and solemn manner. It was the angel GABRIEL [4] one, as we may infer, of the highest order of those intelligences that "circle the throne rejoicing;" and the same glorious spirit who so many ages before had been sent to Daniel, to specify, in a prophetic enigma, the time of "MESSIAH THE PRINCE," which he now came to announce as having ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... said somewhat vexedly. "However, the whole thing is an enigma and would puzzle the most sagacious head. That the physicial workings of the brain, in a site of trance, should arouse in me a passion of love for an imaginary being, and, at the same time, enable to write a poem such as must make the fame ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... messages comes in Georgina, and, hearing that I am writing to you, delivers the following enigma to ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... more than either of the boys had expected that they began to look upon their uncle as an enigma ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... the Seasons go, With store of good and ill; Do all men find you cold as snow, And unresponsive still? O beautiful enigma, say, Will love's sublime persistence Solve for you, in the usual ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... conversations which exercise the intelligence without engrossing the mind, and suffer us to feel, even while conversing, the presence of the one secret and continuous thought concealed in the inmost recesses of our hearts. It was an enigma of which we sought the answer without any great desire to find it. After having read, examined, and noted all that constituted the science at that time, I fancied I could discern a few theoretical ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... was an enigma to him. There was but one way to make her his woman,—his wife,—that was to force her confidence, and, once obtained, keep it. But his longing to caress her was stronger than his desire to conquer ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... to find his answer in the real sentiments of his heart if that heart has any sentiment. I have no doubt however that it contains the real creed of an Englishman, and that the word which he has let escape is the true word of the enigma. 'The moment I see such sentiments as yours prevail, and a disposition to give this country the preference, I will,' &c. All this I steadfastly believe. But the condition is impossible. Our interest calls for a perfect equality in our conduct towards these two nations; but no preferences ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... productiveness were immediately manifested throughout the whole nation; and such a mass of respectable talent was brought to light; that the long interval of a dull and deathlike silence, which preceded this period, presents indeed an enigma difficult to be solved. No small influence may be ascribed to Germany. The principles of the government were changed; the country, physically as well as morally exhausted, could recover but gradually; but all this could not create talents where there were none; ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... could be found, particularly when it is recalled to what desperate straits the colonial leaders were put in securing immigrants,—slavery, indentured servitude, and kidnapping being the fruits of their necessities. The answer to the enigma is to be found partly in European conditions and partly in the cheapness of transportation after the opening of the era of steam navigation. Shrewd observers of the course of events had long foreseen that a flood of cheap labor was bound to come when the way was made ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... I knew," returned the colonel. "If there were any birds around here big enough we might suspect that one of them had carried him off, but we will evidently have to await Pepper's own explanation of the enigma." Then he added after ...
— The Boy Scouts Patrol • Ralph Victor
... seeking to escape from the inflexible circle which he had traced around himself, is an object which cannot fail to awaken the deepest pity. He asks from his fellow men, from nature, from the gods, the meaning of the dire enigma of life. Alas! they leave him to struggle in the stony hands of an unbending Fate! no reply is ever given to his wild demand, and the 'veil of Isis is never raised!' The world quivered under some strange anathema; a mystic malediction ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... fantastical, And of imperial idleness, Your fellah-sphinx presents us all With an enigma worth the guess. ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... puzzled over Villiers' disappearance, so he determined to go in search of evidence against Madame Midas, though for what reason he wanted evidence against her no one but himself—and perhaps Billy—knew. But then Slivers always was an enigma regarding his reasons for doing things, and even the Sphinx would have found him ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... accept the following from a friend in the quaint spirit in which it is written, and understand not by bad company aught that is evil—for if we read the word of the enigma, the 'bad' among her 'friends of the future' is indeed goodness-that saving salt which is often found among many who are too hastily banned as lost in the world. So, we pray you, judge ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... evil in the world; and at the same time she has been exalted to the position of mother of the Saviour of the world. These two positions are as conflicting as the general ideas which have prevailed in regard to woman—the great enigma ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... all Europe as a mere adventurer; and when he finally left England, which had sheltered him, to claim his seat in the National Assembly of republican France, and even when made President of the republic by the suffrages of the nation, he was regarded as an enigma. Some thought him dull though bold, and others looked upon him as astute and long-headed. His heavy look, his leaden eye, his reserved and taciturn ways, with no marked power but that of silence and secrecy, disarmed fear. Neither from his conversations ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... great discomfort of maintaining contact with this mind, he extended his explorations in search of the answer. A growing suspicion was quickly confirmed beyond question, explaining at once the sickening deformities of the wasted mind and the enigma of the alternative means of communication. There simply was no adequate communication! From that, all else stemmed. Each of these creatures, these—he searched for the term—these "Man" as they called themselves, was an island, an isolation of ego in a ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... author's inscribed copy of some choice edition, but why intelligent people should be allured into the belief that an author's stereotyped autograph displayed upon a front page gives any added value to a set of subscription books, will to me, I fear, forever remain a disentangled enigma. I was once applied to by an agent representing a $6000 "Autograph Edition" of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Having never seen Rousseau's autograph, I asked that it be shown me. "Oh," said the agent, "Rousseau himself don't sign the copies, but the ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... very high in Mr. Jessup's esteem. Hiram had proved his value by increasing his employer's business at least ten per cent in the village, while he was daily becoming more popular with all who traded at the store. To Pease this was an enigma, for Hiram never volunteered to wait on a customer, when the former was present, and only stepped forward when specially sought. Even with the young ladies who came to the place, with whom he was on intimate terms of acquaintance, Hiram found no time to laugh and talk, although he always managed ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... enlighten your understanding as by the smiting of a lucifer-match. Refrain, therefore, from running your eye impatiently along the page, as you are doing at this moment, in hopes of discovering, italicized, the secret of the enigma; for we have no intention of keeping you another moment ignorant that the monster-misery of literature is—guess! Which of you hath hit it? The monster-misery of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... original genius qualified him for sympathizing even to excess with any real merits in that work. This novel is in its own nature and purpose sufficiently obscure; and the commentaries which have been written upon it by the Hurnboldts, Schlegels, &c., make the enigma still more enigmatical. We shall not venture abroad upon an ocean of discussion so truly dark, and at the same time so illimitable. Whether it be qualified to excite any deep and sincere feeling of one kind or another ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... head. Hayle's doings were more often than not an enigma to him. Presently, however, the runaway made his appearance before them. His face was flushed and he breathed heavily. Apparently he had been ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... he himself could unfold their meaning, others, who came to peruse these lines, would not be able to fathom them, and he also went on consequently to indite another stanza, in imitation of the "Parasitic Plant," which he inscribed at the close of the enigma; and when he had read it over a second time, he felt his heart so free of all concern that forthwith he got into his ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the casement of hope look for thy coming Along the moss-grown path of stones— Those agonies that time has built on my soul— By the unfathomable lake of my tears Shed when even prayers had failed To bring thy returning. Come, destroyer of my peace and sleep, Plunderer of lights of my days! Enigma on the scroll of my fate Before the lightnings fired my tower And thunders crashed in my life's sky. Only send the echo of thy footfalls— The ring of thy song, And a star—reflection of thy smile— Those million suns in the firmament of ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... depict the Philippine native character, but with only partial success. Dealing with such an enigma, the most eminent physiognomists would surely differ in their speculations regarding the Philippine native of the present day. That Catonian figure, with placid countenance and solemn gravity of feature, would readily deceive any one as to the true mental organism ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... are in our own hands. But it was soon shown how spectrum analysis might be applied to the investigation of the sun and stars; and this result was reached through the solution of a problem which had been long an enigma to natural philosophers. The scope and conquest of this problem we must now endeavour to comprehend. A spectrum is pure in which the colours do not overlap each other. We purify the spectrum by making our beam narrow, and by augmenting the number of our prisms. ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... understanding must yield? If so, where is it? What is its name? If that God punishes us for not having blindly followed a faith that does not force itself irresistibly upon the intelligence which He gave us; if He chastises us for not having made, in the presence of the great enigma with which He confronts us, a choice which condemns the best and most divine part of that which He has placed in us, we have nothing left to reply: we are the dupes of a cruel and incomprehensible sport, we are the victims of ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... I saying? people don't dream as he has lived. No one has ever extracted out of a destiny more than he has. The preposterous and the commonplace are equally familiar to him. He has shone, he has suffered, he has dragged along a humdrum existence: nothing has escaped him.... He is an enigma, a riddle that can ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... Max, though a little frown told that he too considered the enigma a nut hard to crack. "Something that had life about it made that stick do that trick; there's ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... vessel. He was a slight-made, fair-complexioned lad of nineteen or twenty years at the most, without an incipient mark of manhood on his chin. He appeared lively, active, and good-natured; but what were the other qualifications he possessed, to discover such a mark of confidence, were to Newton an enigma requiring solution. ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Meanwhile an enigma remained. Very heroically a young man had done nothing. Hurrah and good-bye! The calciums of curiosity turned on an obscure fiddler who, after murdering another young man, had succeeded in ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... desire urged him to follow her, to learn why this woman was in the car and who was with her. Naturally, he had expected she would be on the yacht now steaming away out to sea, and here she was. A new enigma ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... would his dogs have known, as breathing heavily and wiping their cutlasses, they gathered at a discreet distance from his hook, and squinted through their ferret eyes at this extraordinary man. Elation must have been in his heart, but his face did not reflect it: ever a dark and solitary enigma, he stood aloof from his followers in ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... there was no mystery in their neither sending nor receiving letters. But where did they get their groceries? I do not mean the money to pay for them—that is an enigma apart—but the groceries themselves. No express wagon, no butcher's cart, no vehicle of any description, was ever observed to stop at their domicile. Yet they did not order family stores at the sole establishment in the village—an inexhaustible little bottle of a shop which, I advertise it gratis, ...
— Our New Neighbors At Ponkapog • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... revealed by a biographer, because they are in fact expressions of the whole character. It is necessary to take them into account in order really to understand either the merits or the shortcomings. When they are softened or omitted, the whole story becomes an enigma, and we are often tempted to substitute some less creditable explanation of errors for the true one. We should not do justice to Johnson's intense tenderness, if we did not see how often it was masked by an irritability pardonable in itself, and not affecting the deeper ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... still be able to laugh at the efforts made by its masters to bring it into submission, is truly one of the most amazing spectacles which we have witnessed since the war broke out. General von Bissing has declared that the Belgians are an enigma to him. No wonder. They are an enigma to themselves. I am not going to explain the miracle. I will only attempt to show how inexplicable, how miraculous, ...
— Through the Iron Bars • Emile Cammaerts
... Kathlyn went the rounds of the cages. She was a veritable enigma to Bruce. Tigers lost their tenseness and looked straight into her eyes. A cheetah with cubs permitted her to touch the wabbly infants, whereas the keeper of this cage dared not go within a foot of it. By the time she reached ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... all, Kurho made a token show of interest; he twice lost his temper in boast against boast, but he was more often a blunt enigma. He saw much and said little. Those times when he did speak, so extravagant were his grunt and gesture that much ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... saying to himself in his whimsical way, "It is my destiny—is it not written in the book of fate? The Parcae Sisters three have willed it so. Good heavens, what an enigma life is! Some winged insect whirling in a cyclone would have as much chance of escaping its doom as a human being under such circumstances." Then he stopped, and looked with blank, unseeing eyes down the slanting fir avenue. "It is a mystery," he went on—"the very mystery of mysteries; the Sphinx ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... adherents of religion, nothing could be explicable in the world without it; nature would be a continual enigma; it would be impossible for man to comprehend himself. But, at the bottom, what does this religion explain to us? The more we examine it, the more we find that theological notions are fit but to perplex all our ideas; they change all into mysteries; they explain to us difficult things ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... other and more definite form. Their Son of Man was to come with the clouds of heaven, seated on God's throne, to execute judgment on all sinners and apostates; the Nazarene fulfilled none of these conditions. The name, as used by Jesus, was probably always an enigma to the people, at least until he openly declared its Messianic significance in his reply to the high-priest's question at his trial (Mark xiv. 62), and gave the council the ground it desired for a charge of blasphemy ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... more to gratify the children, as well as to solve the enigma of whether it must be inevitable to lose by keeping these animal, we became the possessors of these superior creatures, with the understanding that no one was to have anything to do with them but Tom, the said Tom saying, with perfect confidence, that "he would ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... says:—"I discovered the solution of the enigma (why the baptismal certificate was so eagerly sought) from a letter written to me three months afterwards by my brother-in-law, Stephan von Breuning, in which he said: 'Beethoven tells me at least once ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... triumphant ripost to the Feast of Reason, which Chaumette and his friends had celebrated in the winter. The energumens of the Goddess of Reason had now been some weeks in their bloody graves; by this time, if they had given the wrong answer to the supreme enigma, their eyes would perhaps be opened. Robespierre persuaded the Convention to decree an official recognition of the Supreme Being, and to attend a commemorative festival in honour of their mystic patron. He contrived to be chosen president for the decade in which the festival would ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... into her mind, Beatrice Miller would never relinquish it until she had got her own way. Herbert, in the dingy solitude of his untempting chambers, might despair and look upon life and its aims as a hopeless enigma. Beatrice did not despair at all. ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... Levillier and Julian gazed at him, and he seemed a mystery to them both, a strange enigma of purity ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... an unfathomable enigma had not Suetonius by chance given us the key to its solution: "Nam illud omnem fidem excesserit, quod nuptiis, quas Messalina cum adultero Silio fecerat, tabellas dotis et ipse consignaverit" ("For that which would pass all belief is the fact that in the marriage which Messalina contracted ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... hold me; that I look like a stranger from another world upon the business of this one; that I am among you, but not of you; that your motives and aims to me are utterly unintelligible; that you can give no account of them to which I can attach any sense; that I have no clue to the enigma you seem so lightly to solve by your religion, your philosophy, your science; that your hopes are not mine, your ambitions not mine, your principles not mine; that I am shipwrecked, and see around me none but are shipwrecked too; yet, ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... with deep pain that their conclusions are in direct conflict with human aspirations; and, instead of revelling in the ruin which they have made, deplore with a tone of sadness the impossibility of solving the great enigma. ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... had drawn him; and now, with my curiosity newly wakened, I asked myself what had been that spell? I also must have been affected by it, for I had been there also in his uncommunicating company. Here, I felt, was perhaps the answer to my question, the secret of the enigma that puzzled me; and as I went over my memories of that time, and revived its sombre and almost sinister fascination, I seemed to see an answer looming before my imagination. But it was an answer, an hypothesis or supposition, so fantastic, that my common ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... experimenting with clays in the hope of discovering how the Chinese made their porcelain. This was no unusual thing, for chemists of most of the other countries were working feverishly in their laboratories at the same enigma." ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... added Porphyry, Proclus, and Jamblichus, who professedly treat of Egyptian learning. The Isis and Osiris of Plutarch may be admitted with proper circumspection. It may be said, that the whole is still an enigma: and I must confess that it is: but we receive it more copiously exemplified; and more clearly defined; and it must necessarily be more genuine, by being nearer the fountain head: so that by comparing, ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... work with the spade for this old buffer, and now the intellect claims its turn. The mind retires above the noisy world to its Acropolis, and there discusses the great problem of the day; the Insular Enigma. To be or not to be, that is the question, I believe. No it is not. That is fully discussed elsewhere. Hum! To diffuse—intelligence—from a fixed island—over one hundred ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... belief that land, in itself, is desirable. But this land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces. He had an idea that no one understood how to farm it properly, and this he often discussed with Alexandra. Their neighbors, ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... was extremely idle. Although by no means lacking in intelligence, all the efforts spent on her failed to bring about a proper advance. All at once she became most industrious; no task was too hard for her, and everyone wondered at the sudden change, until after a time the enigma was explained. The child, having conceived a great fondness for her schoolmistress, wished to please the latter by attention to her lessons. In addition, she was jealous; afraid lest the mistress should prefer some other girl. In many instances, where a child's behaviour is puzzling, such a solution ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... Vilains of Pareil by Monceaux, his father living on the edge of the park, little more than a thousand yards from the chateau; and I knew no harm of him. Still, I knew little; and for that reason was forward to believe that there, rather than in my own household, lay the key to the enigma. ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... which two richly gallooned servants of the cardinal walked back and forth with solemn earnestness, but respectfully requesting every one to comply with the cardinal's wishes and not approach the mysterious drapery, but await his own time for the solution of the enigma! A few steps led up to this closed and covered niche; these steps were strewed with roses, that was plainly seen; but, to what did these steps lead, and what was ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... receiving a letter from the father of his mistress, wrote in a manner which he might look upon as a kind of confirmation he no longer would be refractory to his wishes, the latter part of it contained an enigma he could by no means comprehend.—It seemed impossible to him there could be any reasons prevalent enough to make him quit, with honour, a prince who had so liberally rewarded his service; but hoping a further explanation, he lost not any time in conjectures; and tearing open the other ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... fell into my lap a second time; I was almost dazed with astonishment. To think that at the very moment when I was puzzling over the melancholy enigma, of where to find a home whose shelter could be both generously given and comfortably received, this strange but earnest ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... consuls, khans from earth's whole regions come, Pour in their wealth, and then inquire their doom; Furious and wild the priestess rends her veil, Sucks, thro the sacred stool, the maddening gale, Starts reddens foams and screams and mutters loud, Like a fell fiend, her oracles of God. The dark enigma, by the pontiff scroll'd In broken phrase, and close in parchment roll'd, From his proud pulpit to the suppliant hurl'd, Shall rive an empire and distract ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... inscription, almost obliterated, is interpreted by Mr. Lethaby as signifying, that in the year 1268 "Henry III. being King, and Odericus the cementarius, Richard de Ware, Abbot, brought the porphyry and divers jaspers and marbles of Thaso from Rome." In another place a sort of enigma, drawn from an arbitrary combination of animal forms and numbers, marks a chart for determining the end of the world! There is also a beautiful mosaic tomb at Westminster, inlaid with an interlacing pattern in a ground of marble, like the work so usual in Rome, and in Palermo, and ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... you. Would you like us to go down to Monsieur de Saint-Aignan's rooms? Perhaps we shall be able to find the solution of the enigma there." ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... self—the Netta of the Farm was no more, and her representative was, to Owen at least, an anomaly. How she could have acquired such an amount of small talk, and such a mincing speech in nine months, was an enigma to him. London, Paris, the opera, the fashions, even the picture galleries, were alternately in her mouth; and she poured out tea and coffee, and laughed a silly laugh, much to her own satisfaction, and Owen's disgust, ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... enigma in regard to FATALITY, men err in conceiving that all the remote causes which lead to an event, operate and combine for the sake of some particular result, instead of considering every personal or social event as the necessary single effect of the proximate ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... written down on a piece of paper the solution of the enigma, as interpreted by his father, though not the symbol words of the cablegram. He continued to write for a little longer time, amplifying and filling in the wanting parts of the message. Then he read what he had written, as follows: "'The ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... a thoroughly sensible remark. But somehow the professor did not like it. After all, thirty-five is not so terribly old. He decided to change the subject. But there was no immediate hurry. It was pleasant to lie there in the firelight watching this enigma of girl-hood dry her hair. Perhaps she would notice his silence and ask him ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... witch. She leaves us poor, friendless, dependent; she returns to us rich, powerful, and with influential friends ready to serve those who once protected her. But I think I have found the key to the enigma. Did we not hear strict orders given that none but the Countess Orlowski should be admitted? Well, Madeleine was at once allowed to enter: it follows, beyond doubt, that she is ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... from the first moment at which his name had been mentioned in the House of Commons. He was now in an agony of terror. The whole enigma of his life, an enigma of which many unsatisfactory and some absurd explanations have been propounded, is at once solved if we consider him as a man insatiably greedy of wealth and power, and yet nervously apprehensive ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... around her with an air of triumph; but whether that look communicated the triumph of success, or that of her inveterate enmity and contempt for them ever since the death of old Hamilton, was as great a secret to them as the Bononian enigma. There was a dead silence, much to her mortification, for she would have given a great deal that her husband had interrupted her just then, and taken ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... did the always-baffled, always reaespiring hope of the finite to compass the infinite find such expression, except in the sehnsucht of music. They are buried in the volume. They cannot believe that it has not somewhere been revealed, the word of enigma, the link between the human and divine, matter and spirit. Evidently, they hope to find it on the very next page. I have always thought, that clearly enough did nature and the soul's own consciousness respond to the craving for ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... was that you yourself stood inside the house and pulled, and yet at the same time you could watch through the open doors in the wall how the rope outside went up or down. How it came about was an enigma. But you had the refreshing consciousness of having accomplished something—saw the results of your efforts before ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... great, though circumscribed depressions on a wide platform, and left mere gorges at the openings, through which the whole vast amount of triturated matter must have been carried away? The only light I can throw upon this enigma, is by remarking that banks of the most irregular forms appear to be now forming in some seas, as in parts of the West Indies and in the Red Sea, and that their sides are exceedingly steep. Such banks, I have been led to suppose, have been formed by sediment heaped by strong currents on an irregular ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the Whispering Pines Miss Hurd. An Enigma Leavenworth Case That Affair Next Door Strange Disappearance Lost Man's Lane Sword of Damocles Agatha Webb Hand and Ring One of My Sons The Mill Mystery Defence of the Bride, Behind Closed Doors and Other Poems Cynthia Wakeham's Money Risifi's Daughter. A Drama Marked "Personal" The Golden ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... privacy. As was natural the more it became known that he wanted to escape observation the more was curiosity aroused to see him, so that a considerable part of his life was spent in adopting stratagems to prevent sight-seers from catching a glimpse of the aristocratic enigma. ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard |
